


What We Lose

by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Episode Tag, Gen, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-09 02:06:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14707065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: “Let me guess,” she says. “Penguin wants to talk to me.”Lee wakes up and finds out what she missed. Post 4x22.





	What We Lose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Legs (InsanityRule)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsanityRule/gifts).



Lee comes around – or, she only realizes later, comes back – in a guest bedroom in Carmine Falcone’s old house, and when she works that out she closes her eyes for a minute and tries to be the kind of person who could believe that this past year was just a bad dream. Mario’s one room over, and later at dinner he’ll lean in to put a hand on her knee and whisper about how badly he slept without her, and she’ll tease him about the hypocrisy of her future father-in-law, who’s just fine with murder but draws the line at an unmarried couple sharing a bed under his roof.

But she’s a realist. Mario and Carmine are dead and in the ground, and this house’s current owner is comatose in Gotham General with a bullet in her brain that Lee put there, and she didn’t just dream the wound beneath her ribs that feels like fire when she tries to sit up. She cautiously puts her hand there, feeling gauze below the cotton nightgown someone’s put her in. The dressing’s not as thick as she would have expected. With how deep Ed cut her, she didn’t expect to wake up at all.

The door opens, and she tenses. The burly man who looks in on her is a stranger, but the broken nose, the breadth of his shoulders, the all-black ensemble, it screams henchman-for-hire. Which fits perfectly with what she was already beginning to suspect about who would have brought her here instead of a hospital.

“Let me guess,” she says, and has to clear her throat; that came out as a croak. More firmly, she says, “Penguin wants to talk to me.”

**

She cajoles the goon into going to scavenge some clothes with a refusal to leave the bed and a few observations about how much Oswald Cobblepot loves to be kept waiting. He looks angry, but disappears for a few minutes and returns with a bathroom robe that must have belonged to Carmine, a thick towelled thing that trails on the floor and could wrap around her twice. It’s royal blue. She doesn’t miss the irony. Barefoot, every step sending a fresh jolt of pain through her side, the Queen of the Narrows doesn’t feel too regal right now.

She expects to be led downstairs to the parlor, where Sofia once served her up tea and false promises of friendship, where she pressed hands and listened to condolences from stranger after stranger the day of Mario’s funeral until the faces blurred into one another. Instead her new friend takes her to the end of the hallway.

She’s never seen the master bedroom before. It’s large and light, early morning sunlight streaming through the windows and onto the bed. She’s always associated Carmine with red – his name, of course, and he loved his roses – but the bedclothes match her borrowed robe, deep blue.

Ed looks very pale in contrast. No glasses, his arms above the covers at his sides. Lee stops in the doorway and watches him until a tiny twitch in one of his fingers tells her he’s unconscious and not dead.

She’s too exhausted to laugh. Just like Sofia. She keeps killing people and they keep not dying, as if the universe is determined to hold her to her Hippocratic Oath.

“Boss...” her escort says.

Oswald, sitting in a dining-room chair that’s been moved to beside the bed, addresses him without taking his eyes off Ed. “Get out.”

 “You know,” he says as the door closes, “I expect this kind of nonsense from him. He can’t help it; he is what he is. But I thought better of you, I really did.”

“I’m fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

“The city’s in chaos,” he says. “Jeremiah Valeska bombed the bridges. Thousands are dead. The whole electrical grid is down. Everybody who didn’t evacuate is rioting. Just bringing you up to speed on this since I realize you were busy with,” he gestures between her and Ed’s unconscious figure, “more important things while your precious Narrows was going up in flames.”

She wants to believe it’s a trick, some mind game in retaliation for Ed choosing her over him at the bank – but something’s felt off since she woke up, and now she puts it together. No cars outside. No sounds of machinery in the house, no faint noises of distant washer-dryers or television sets.

“I have to get back,” she says.

Oswald finally turns to her, and if she’d never met him before she’d say his expression was calm. As it is, she guesses it’s more like the stillness in the eye of a hurricane.

“ _He’s_ fine, by the way,” Oswald says. “Or he will be. Thanks for asking.”

“Like you just said, there are more important things right now.”

She’s not sure anybody in her life’s ever looked at her so intently before. She fights the urge to pull her borrowed robe tighter around herself. “I suppose that’s true,” Oswald says at last, when he’s done searching her face for whatever it is he’s looking for. “For you.”

“What do you want, Oswald? For me to bend the knee? Tell the Narrows to fall in line? Fine. Whatever you want, but I have to get back out there.”

“They do desperately need doctors,” Oswald agrees. “And half the civilians left in the city are from the Narrows. _And_ I’m sure Jim Gordon’s going to be thrilled to see you alive and well. You might be the single most useful ally I could possibly have.” He sits back in his chair, letting his head drop to his left to look at the figure in the bed. “My only problem is – do you know that quotation, ‘What profits a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul’? It’s from the Bible. I don’t know which part.”

“My husband was Catholic,” she says. “Yes, I know it.”

“I only ever heard it at my father’s funeral. I thought the words were pretty, but I didn’t really understand what it meant. Gaining the whole world, that sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? I wasn’t even sure I _had_ a soul.” He reaches out and traces one finger, gloved, along the back of Ed’s hand. “And then I walked into your little club in the Narrows yesterday, looking for the two of you, hoping to make an alliance in these troubled times, and I found out, surprise, I do have a soul. I just didn’t know until you stuck a knife in it.”

She wishes she had that knife right now. Oswald’s unarmed, as far as she can see, but the hairs on the back of her neck are standing up just the same as when Ed walked in behind her yesterday and she _knew_ it was time to kill or be killed.

“Oswald, it was self defence. I told him we were over. He was going to kill me.”

Oswald says, “He did kill you.” So bluntly and so without malice that she believes him. She thinks of Jerome Valeska, dead and then not; she thinks that she should never have come back to this city.

“Then you must have had Hugo Strange bring me back,” she says, matching the evenness of his tone. Her life might depend on it. “I don’t think you did that just to kill me.”

“I did it to Butch,” he says, almost conversationally. “I do feel a little bad about it. He was a good friend, some of the time. But my mother died in my arms, and I could never, ever have forgiven her killer for that.” He looks up at her. “You were already dead when I got there. Ed lasted another few minutes.” And then he smiles. Or he bares his teeth, at least. “But! That’s a conversation for another day. For now, Doctor Thompkins, you and I have a city in crisis that needs our strong leadership.”

There’s nothing she can say for now, she realizes, any more than she could have talked Ed out of what she knew was the end of their story from the moment she first kissed him. He and Oswald are the same, and ridiculously, from nowhere, she remembers Jim making fun of Ed and Kristen, and chiding him _there’s a lid for every pot_.

Oswald gets to his feet, and leans down across the bed to smooth back Ed’s hair and press a kiss to his forehead, and she thinks she had no idea how right she was.


End file.
